And then the chanting began. Amin’s hands brushed his scales, his wings. A warmth radiated out from the slave’s fingertips, and Inys felt an energy answering it. As if his own ability to heal had been sleeping and now roused, the dragon felt the rough scales shift and realign. The torn fabric of his wings knit together. The aches of his newest wounds and his oldest scars eased, even where they had been for so long he’d forgotten the ache was there. But that was not the greatest gift the chanting carried.
Against all hope, the melody was one Inys knew. He didn’t realize it at first, lost in the bliss of his remaking, but soon he realized he was anticipating the song, expecting the rising trill, the falling cadence, the near resolution that danced away again. It was one he had heard from Asteril when they’d been young and fresh as a first flight. The syllables were foreign and unfamiliar, but when he turned his attention to it, there were even fragments of the old languages. Bits of human words that echoed and carried all unknowing the power of humanity’s masters, even in the masters’ absence.
And that, Inys thought, his heart lifting in joy, was more than a lone healer’s cantrip. That was the whole of the world. He had thought the dragons gone, apart from himself, but it was true only in one sense. Yes, he was, unless another sleeper lay buried in the world, the last to lay claim to his own whole body, his own complete mind. But like the shards from a broken glass, the dragons were still everywhere. In the bodies of the races they’d made, in the poems and magics that their cunning men passed down through the generations, in the slave paths they had imposed on the changing face of the earth.
He remembered a little thing his first teacher, Myrix, had shown him. A sheet of crystal with a moment’s light captured within it, so that the paths of it shaped any new raw light into the form of it. As the surface of a pond alive with ripples and then suddenly frozen held the pattern of all the cooperating and annihilating waves, even a sliver of the crystal was formed of all that the full stone knew. With a sense of comprehension deeper than love, Inys saw that the world was the same way.
The shards of the dragons were in the laws that humans enforced upon each other. In the shapes of their bodies and the functions of their minds. The way their cities grew and the melodies of their songs. To bring the dragons forth again into the world wouldn’t be an act of creation, but of reassembly. He shuddered with pleasure. And with hope.
The chanting stopped. Amin stepped back. How long it had been, Inys couldn’t say, only the sun was in the sky now, pricking at the Nightswarm boy’s too-large eyes. Amin’s skin was covered in a sheen of sour-smelling sweat, and he trembled. His heart was calm, though. The fear was gone.
Inys took stock, and was pleased. Even with the char fallen away, his wounds no longer bled. The scars of his old battles had faded or vanished away. Even the tatters and holes of his wings had been repaired, the membrane thinner where it had ripped, but whole again. When he stood and stretched his wings out, his bones didn’t ache. He was astonished at how much of himself the slave had offered up.
Inys folded himself down to consider the boy. The Nightswarm blinked and made the curious gesture again. This time it seemed less the motion of a bird and more that of a dragon’s wings.
“I am on a desperate journey,” Inys said. “I will remake my kind and redeem my errors, but the path I seek is long and terrible. You have already done me great good. Greater even than you know. I name you Amin Stormcrow, first among my servants and destined to command all those who follow after, three upon three upon three.”
The boy fell to his knees. “I… I am yours,” he said.
“Swear to me now that you will never act against me. That you will never betray me.”
“I swear I will never betray you, higher-than-mothers. What you wish, I shall wish. Now and always.”
Inys shifted back a degree. He sensed no duplicity in the boy’s words, but neither had he in Marcus Stormcrow or the half-breed banker girl. Better to learn from his errors. Better not to repeat them.
“I don’t believe you,” Inys said, and killed him.
The Nightswarm’s blood had a strange, almost peppery taste, and his flesh was tough. Inys ate until his belly was full, then launched into the wide, open air, testing his newly-healed wings and leaving the rest of the body behind for the flies and jungle scavengers. Within the hour, he found the coast—huge waves breaking on a beach of perfect white sand. He landed in the high surf gently, delicately, and washed the last of the boy’s blood from his scales. Then, for a time, he lay on the sand-strewn beach, his neck stretched out. The sun warmed him and the sound of the water lulled him until, half dreaming, he felt he could hear a choir of dragons, their voices raised in song, in among the waves.
Refreshed, renewed, and confirmed in his task, he would fly to the south until he unearthed the workshop or discovered it definitively to be a mirage. He would gather all that he could of dragon-nature from the world, distill it, and call it forth to its true and purer form. He would redeem his error. All his errors.
Only first, he would sleep a while. Not for long, though. Not again.
Marcus
They left the permanent green of the dragon’s road behind them in the middle morning, where it curved north along the track toward Kaltfel and Anninfort. The little villages that clung to the jade path, making their keep from the traffic of merchants and farmers and all human trade like ticks on a dog’s ear, vanished quickly behind them. The roads turned to gravel or mud or two strips of crushed grass running parallel across the fields, a cart’s width apart. The last march of the war was to be on human paths. That seemed like an omen, though Marcus was damned if he could say if it was a good one or bad.
The farmhouses and stream-run mills they passed weren’t only Firstblood homes. The men and women and children who came out to gawk as they passed were also fur-pelted Kurtadam shaved to the skin for summer, Jasuru with scales that looked more like a dragon’s now that he’d seen a dragon up close, reed-thin Cinnae, even a family of tusk-jawed Yemmu. No Timzinae, though. Or at least none the company hadn’t brought itself.
The land itself was lush with the high summer. Tall grasses hummed with insect life. The sun’s heat would have been stifling if a breeze hadn’t stirred the air. The trees had traded the peapod-green leaves of spring for deeper, more mature foliage that, in ten weeks or so, would shrivel and brown and fall. There were no flowers on the branches and few on the bushes, but green nuts and acorns, ripening berries and seedpods. They rode through a deep scent of growth and decay, the complex perfume of every summer ever. They weren’t a day outside the city, and already the jays and sparrows here were unaware there’d been a war on. Would have been astonished to hear it.
Jorey’s scouts met them in the early afternoon; bone-thin men whose eyes registered neither grief nor wonder at seeing them there, hearing the news of the Lord Regent’s death and the slaughter of the spider goddess. They only nodded, accepting what they heard because the strength it would have taken to feel anything was beyond them. They wouldn’t be called heroes when this was done. Just soldiers, and maybe not even that. It didn’t seem right.
Aster rode at the column’s head on a silver mare that might have been bred to the task of looking regal and being calm. The boy himself sat his mount like he’d been born to it. Maybe he had. Marcus didn’t know much about the tradition of horsemanship in Antea, but it was a common enough way to make a leader seem greater than those around him. And Aster would need all of that he could muster. Someone had convinced him to shave off the peach-fuzz moustache he’d been attempting and Cithrin had reminded him a bit of how to seem older than he truly was. Better to look youthful than young, she’d said. Odd, the way tricks and skills once learned cycled back to be useful again in strange circumstances.
And, as if in echo of the boy at the column’s head, the Timzinae children rode behind, tended by Clara Kalliam and a dozen other women of the court. Eight carts of girls and boys, most too young for heavy labor, and each w
ith a fresh new toy to cling to, each fed with raisin cakes and lemon bread. Each in bright new clothing that had belonged to a Firstblood child not long ago, or else had been newly sewn for the occasion. The contents of Geder Palliako’s gaol. The ones who’d survived. They’d wrapped them up like wedding presents, as though acting as if it were a celebration could forgive the gaps in their lines. The ones who wouldn’t come home.
For himself, Marcus tried to ignore the pain. A young Southling cunning man had done her best to patch his opened arm back together, and all in all she’d done a serviceable job. Apart from a hole the size of a coin near his shoulder, he wasn’t bleeding anymore, and even that was only weeping. The poisoned sword was back in the city, which likely helped as well. It was hard to believe that any wound, however well tended, would mend in that thing’s presence.
Yardem rode at his side, and by the time they reached the little confluence of streams that was their goal, he’d almost stopped checking whether Marcus was about to fall off his horse every third breath. Not that the concern wasn’t appreciated in spirit. It was the practice that annoyed. In the end it mattered that his armor fit him, which it did well enough, that the soldiers who rode with him looked more an honor guard than a fighting force, and that Cithrin rode by Aster’s side. Cithrin bel Sarcour of the Medean bank, who’d risked life and fortune for the Timzinae in occupied Suddapal, and was about to trade her reputation and eight cartfuls of children for peace. Assuming she could find a buyer.
God knew she looked the part. She didn’t wear mail, but she managed to make a well-cut dress and a hunter’s leathers seem as imposing. Her Cinnae mother’s blood left her seeming elegant more than frail, her Firstblood father having given her a strength about the spine and shoulders. Or maybe that was unfair. Maybe Cithrin was only Cithrin, and her virtues and flaws her own. She was old enough to have earned them. If he could still see the amateur smuggler called Tag when he looked at her, it didn’t matter. How she seemed to him wasn’t the point. What mattered was how she—how all of them—impressed Karol Dannien. Or failed to.
The field of parley wasn’t actually a field this time. Low, sharp hills marked the path like the landscape stuttering. The curve of one made a natural amphitheater, open to the south so that when Dannien and his men arrived, Lord Emming, Cithrin, Aster, and Marcus himself were all waiting at the table. It was the kind of staging Kit would approve of. Or no. Would have approved of. Marcus still couldn’t quite believe the old actor had walked into the flames that way…
The banner of Antea and Aster’s personal sigil hung above them. The blood-red banner of the priests was absent. The carts stood a little apart, but not so far that the opposing force could overlook them. The presence of children alone argued against violence, or Marcus hoped it did. Seemed rude to slaughter anyone else where the little ones could see, but worse things had happened in the world. And he could tell from the way Dannien walked that he was angry.
Cep Bailan strode at Dannien’s side bare-chested, rolls of blubber shifting as he walked and his ornate blue tattoos brightened by sweat like stones in water. Summer in Antea couldn’t be a pleasant place for a Haaverkin, but Bailan had chosen to take work in the south. And if the heat exhausted him, maybe he wouldn’t talk much. The man was an ass. Behind them, Timzinae soldiers stood in ranks, swords at their sides, and stared across the gap at the children. Even at this distance, Marcus saw the focus—as strong as hunger—that fought against their discipline. How many of those men there had children among the hostages? Nephews, nieces, daughters, and sons. As many as Geder had hauled up north, it didn’t seem any family in Suddapal could have gone untouched.
Dannien sat at his chair, his gaze roving across the opposing group, lingering on each in turn. Bailan only collapsed onto his stool and panted, waving a hand at his face like a fan. Aster’s expression was calm. Either the boy didn’t understand he was facing a man who’d sworn to kill not just him but everyone who served him or else he had the makings of a better-than-average king. Ignorance and bravery could be hard to distinguish with only one experience to judge from. Dannien’s gaze skipped over Emming like he wasn’t there, but lingered on Cithrin and stopped at Marcus with a nod.
“Ran away last time,” Dannien said.
Ignoring Aster was a calculated rudeness. Taking offense was the first step down a path they didn’t want, so Marcus chuckled. “Wouldn’t count on it again. It’s not a trick that works twice.”
“Be drinking on it the rest of the season, though. Karol Dannien, the man who made Marcus Wester sneak away in the night.” Despite himself, Marcus tensed. Dannien smiled and turned to Aster. “So, are we here for terms of surrender?”
“This isn’t a surrender,” Cithrin said. “Your enemy’s already conquered. We’ve come to bring the happy news and offer you our help as allies. You know who I am, yes?”
“I do,” Dannien said grudgingly. “And I’m as surprised to see you on the other side of this as I was to see Wester. Figured he’d got his head folded by these priests, now maybe you have too.”
“They’re dead,” Emming said. “We killed them all. We killed them. Prince Aster and the others here. Our nation has been through a nightmare. Nightmare!”
Cithrin hid her annoyance well. Not perfectly, but well. “It’s true. The spider priests were an artifact of the dragons, built to make war between—”
“I know,” Dannien said. “I read the letters. I’ve been getting updated from the council and your Magistra Isadau damn near since I went on this campaign.”
“Then you know this wasn’t Antea’s fault,” Cithrin said.
“That I do not,” Dannien said. Cep Bailan wheezed and leaned forward, his head on the table. Dannien kicked him, and he sat back up. “So how’s about you tell me the whole story of how Antea could slaughter thousands, burn villages to the ground, put free men and women in slave collars, and throw babies off bridges, and still have clean hands.”
It wasn’t the best reception they could have hoped for, but it wasn’t the worst. Cithrin leaned forward, her chin high the way Kit and Cary had taught her once, years ago. She spoke clearly, cleanly, without flourishes or rhetoric. She laid out the story like she was a scout bringing a report. Every time Emming tried to insert himself, she cut him back.
Through Geder Palliako, the priests had taken root in Camnipol, subjugating it long before Antea’s aggressions in the east. The priests had spread lies and fear, and those who’d stood against them had been killed or exiled. Camnipol had been as much under a conqueror’s thumb as Nus or Inentai or Suddapal. The forces that had resisted it had been met with ruthless slaughter, not the least of them Dawson Kalliam, who had been the first to stand against Palliako and his priests.
But it was over now, the priests destroyed, Palliako dead, and Aster—the rightful king—returned to the throne. The way she told it, Dannien and his men had been in alliance with Aster even as they invaded his lands, only they hadn’t known it.
It was a vast simplification, and like all of its sort, it erased what Cithrin wanted gone. Geder had been working with her as well at the end, but no call to point that up. Evil, false rulers were easier to understand. The children thrown to their deaths hadn’t been ordered so by the priests. The slaves whipped and abused on Antean farms hadn’t suffered because of Basrahip, but because of the instinctive cruelty of people in power over those they controlled. Her story ignored generations of Antean wars in the Free Cities, the suppressed revolt of Anninfort, the whole long history of battle and conquest, blood and fire and sword that was human history even without the dragons to spur them into it. To hear Cithrin speak, war had been created by Morade and hidden in a box that Geder opened. It felt to Marcus like a lie. But a necessary one.
“So that’s it?” Dannien said when she finished. “Tyrant’s dead, rightful king’s on the throne, and now all’s made right in the land? That how it’s supposed to work?”
“You can come back to the city with us,” Emming said. “Se
nd your emissary or come yourself. You can see it’s all true.”
“What do I care if your tower won’t stand up?” Dannien said. “I’ve been walking for a lot of weeks now with people who’ve lost homes and family. Who didn’t do anything but be born to the wrong race. And if you think for half a minute there won’t be a reckoning for what’s happened, you’re mad and stupid too. Even you, Magistra.”
“There will be,” Cithrin said. “There will be a reckoning. There has to be. But it will be in coin and land. Trades, treaties. Compensations. Not blood. There’ll be no reckoning in blood. Here.” She took the little golden cask from under her chair and put it on the table for Dannien to take. “It’s letters to every farmhold in Antea. It frees every Timzinae slave, whether they were taken in the war or indentured before then. All of them.”
“Really?” Dannien said. “Going to feed me my own food next? I can free anyone I see fit and put any farmers that disagree in with the pig slop. What do I need your word for to do it?”
“It’s a gesture,” Cithrin said.
Cep Bailan, recovered from the heat, grinned. He had an ugly grin. “I know another gesture. Wanna see it?”
“Fuck’s sake, Karol,” Marcus said. “They’re trying to end this.”
“So they don’t get their own noses bloodied,” Dannien snapped. “Let ’em see what losing a war feels like, and maybe they won’t be so damned fast to start the next one.”
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